A Note on methodology: 4-year colleges and universities

There are two primary goals to our methodology. First, we considered no single category to be more important than any other. Second, the final rankings needed to reflect excellence across the full breadth of our measures, rather than reward an exceptionally high focus on, say, research. Thus, all three main categories were weighted equally when calculating the final score. In order to ensure that each measurement contributed equally to a school’s score within any given category, we standardized each data set so that each had a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one. The data were also adjusted to account for statistical outliers. No school’s performance in any single area was allowed to exceed five standard deviations from the mean of the data set. Thanks to rounding, some schools have the same overall score. We have ranked them according to their pre-rounding results.

The set of colleges included in the rankings has changed since last year. For the 2011 rankings, we included all colleges ranked by U.S. News & World Report in 2010. U.S. News changed its selection criteria in 2011 and we wanted a clear set of rules for including or excluding colleges, so we developed specific criteria for the Washington Monthly rankings. We started with 1,762 colleges that are listed in the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) as having a Carnegie basic classification of research, master’s, baccalaureate, and baccalaureate/associate’s colleges and were not exclusively graduate schools. We then excluded 145 colleges which reported that at least half of the undergraduate degrees awarded in 2009-10 were not bachelor’s degrees as well as the seventeen colleges with fewer than 100 undergraduate students in fall 2010. Next, we decided to exclude the five federal military academies (Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Merchant Marine, and Navy) because their unique missions make them difficult to evaluate using our methodology. Our rankings are based in part on the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants and the percentage of students enrolled in ROTC, whereas the service academies provide all students with free tuition (and thus no Pell Grants) and commission graduates as officers in the armed services (and thus not the ROTC program). Our final set of exclusions was to not rank colleges that had not reported any of the three main measures used in the social mobility section (percent Pell, graduation rate, and net price) in the past three years. This resulted in a final sample of 1,569 colleges and includes public, private nonprofit, and for-profit colleges.

Each of our three categories includes several components. We have determined the community service score by measuring each school’s performance in five different areas: the size of each school’s Air Force, Army, and Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps programs, relative to the size of the school; the number of alumni currently serving in the Peace Corps, relative to the size of the school; the percentage of federal work-study grant money spent on community service projects; a combined score based on the number of students participating in community service and total service hours performed, both relative to school size; and a combined score based on the number of full-time staff supporting community service, relative to the total number of staff, the number of academic courses that incorporate service, relative to school size, and whether the institution provides scholarships for community service.

The latter two measures are based on data reported to the Corporation for National and Community Service by colleges and universities in their applications for the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll. The first is a measure of student participation in community service and the second is a measure of institutional support for service. Colleges that did not submit applications had no data and were given zeros on these measures. Some schools that dropped in our service rankings this year completed an application in 2010 and therefore received credit in last year’s rankings, but did not submit an application in 2011 and therefore did not receive credit on these measures in this year’s rankings. (Our advice to those schools: If you care about service, believe you do a good job of promoting it, and want the world to know, then fill out the application!)

The research score for national universities is also based on five measurements: the total amount of an institution’s research spending (from the Center for Measuring University Performance and the National Science Foundation); the number of science and engineering PhDs award-ed by the university; the number of undergraduate alumni who have gone on to receive a PhD in any subject, relative to the size of the school; the number of faculty receiving prestigious awards, relative to the number of full-time faculty; and the number of faculty in the National Academies, relative to the number of full-time faculty. For national universities, we weighted each of these components equally to determine a school’s final score in the category. For liberal arts colleges, master’s universities, and baccalaureate colleges, which do not have extensive doctoral programs, science and engineering PhDs were excluded and we gave double weight to the number of alumni who go on to get PhDs. Faculty awards and National Academy membership were not included in the research score for these institutions because such data is available for only a relative handful of these schools.

As some readers have pointed out in previous years, our research score rewards large schools for their size. This is intentional. It is the huge numbers of scientists, engineers, and PhDs that larger universities produce, combined with their enormous amounts of research spending, that will help keep America competitive in an increasingly global economy. But the two measures of university research quality—faculty awards and National Academy members, relative to the number of full-time faculty (from the Center for Measuring University Performance)—are independent of a school’s size.

The social mobility score is more complicated. We have data from the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System survey that tell us the percentage of a school’s students on Pell Grants, which is a good measure of a school’s commitment to educating lower-income students. We’d like to know how many of these Pell Grant recipients graduate, but schools aren’t required to report those figures. Still, because lower-income students at any school are less likely to graduate than wealthier ones, the percentage of Pell Grant recipients is a meaningful indicator in and of itself. If a campus has a large percentage of Pell Grant students—that is to say, if its student body is disproportionately poor—it will tend to diminish the school’s overall graduation rate.

We first predicted the percentage of students on Pell Grants based on the average SAT score and the percentage of students admitted. This indicated which selective universities (since selectivity is highly correlated with SAT scores and admit rates) are making the effort to enroll low-income students. (Since most schools only provide the twenty-fifth percentile and the seventy-fifth percentile of scores, we took the mean of the two. For schools where a majority of students took the ACT, we converted ACT scores into SAT equivalents.)

The predicted graduation rate measure has been substantially changed since last year’s rankings, based on research by Robert Kelchen, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and methodologist for this year’s college guide, and Douglas N. Harris, associate professor at Tulane University. While last year’s formula predicted graduation rates based on the percentage of Pell Grant students and its average SAT score, this year’s formula includes other characteristics that are associated with the academic preparation and resources of its students. In addition to the percentage of Pell recipients and the average SAT score, the formula includes the percentage of students receiving student loans, the admit rate, the racial/ethnic and gender makeup of the student body, the number of students (overall and full-time), and institutional characteristics such as type of control (public, private nonprofit, and for-profit), and whether a college is a historically black college or university (HBCU) or primarily residential. We estimated this predicted graduation rate measure in a regression model separately for each classification, either using data from a prior year or imputing for missing data when necessary. Schools with graduation rates that are higher than the “average” school with similar stats score better than schools that match or, worse, undershoot the mark. One school, the California Institute of Technology, had a predicted graduation rate of over 100 percent. We adjusted this graduation rate to 100 percent.

We then divided the difference between the actual and predicted graduation rate by the net price of attendance, defined as the average price that first-time, full-time students who receive financial aid pay for college after subtracting need-based financial aid. This cost-adjusted graduation rate measure rewards colleges that do a good job of both graduating students and keeping costs low. Two colleges (Berea College and Macon State College) reported negative net prices and were scaled back to the smallest positive net price reported by any college ($1,255). The two social mobility formulas (actual vs. predicted percent Pell and cost-adjusted graduation rate performance) were weighted equally.